Another pearl of wisdom from Igor Zabuta's blog - but this one is penned by his partner, Emma Kologrivova. She writes about all the cool things which draw women into tango, including "a desire to be lead, to relax, to immerse into the dance, the body and the music" ... and then continues (translation is mine):
Maybe for my lack of imagination, I reused an image from my other "translated wisdom" blog post about the art of active following.
Truth be said, with the experience comes an understanding that following is a complicated skill. It requires a sense of one's own axis and boundaries. An ability to let the partner's energy in - but not to dissolve in it. An ability to follow the suggestions - but not to guess, hurriedly. To listen to the leader - but also to sense one's own desires. To be whole, letting every signal to pass through the body, but also to have an inspiration to add your own personality to the moves. To be lead, but never to be forced.
Back in January, I wrote that I have already introduced all the important musicians in tango's history in the comments to my playlists on this blog, and it's a good enough reason to stop publishing playlists altogether (not to mention the obvious fact that most of the new tandas look very familiar after so many years of DJing :) ) Still, occasionally I find a thread of history worth writing about, or try a new orchestra or an unusual era of a better-known orchestra, or start "reinventing the bicycle" of the tandas which feel far too familiar. Here I'm going through the 10 playlists I added since the decision to stop set-blogging, to pick the few tandas worth writing about.
Julio Sosa with his DKW-Sissore, a German-designed
sports car with an Italian body manufactured at a
short-lived small car factory in the Argentinian province
of Santa Fe in the 1960s. The singer didn't survive a
crash of this beauty. He was 38.
For Julio Sosas's February birthday, I went through tons of his recording and ended up building just one mixed tanda with a lone Sosa track for the Junando practica. We don't hear much Julio Sosa at our milongas, obviously, but it could have been very different, had El Varon del Tango not died so early, at 38! Julio Sosa was born on February 2, 1926, in the poverty-stricken outskirts of Montevideo in Uruguay. One of his many early jobs was with a provincial orchestras there, but it paid too little to make ends meet, and at 23, Julio quit it to sing in the cafes of BsAs. Soon, he was noticed, and got a succession of jobs with the 2nd tier tango bands, and finally, in 1960, convened his own orchestra. By all accounts, it was a wrong time to start a tango band. The government support for the national music of tango disappeared with the violent overthrow of Peron's populist regime, and the new happy-and-patronizing music of La Nueva Ola was all the rage. Even the master records of the Golden Age tango orchestras ended up destroyed to make room for more Nueva Ola studios! I wrote about the Dark Ages of Tango on this blog before, but I failed to mention that for a while, Julio Sosa held the lines against the onslaught of the new commercial music. Tall, masculine, young and charismatic, Sosa continued to attract the youth to tango - and not just to listen, but also to dance like himself. His disc sales rivaled those of La Nueva Ola! It all ended on November 26, 1964, when Julio crashed his Argentine-built sports car into a traffic light, the third speed car he totaled in quick succession, only this time it was fatal. With the death of its last iconic singer, tango never stood a chance...
The verdict: it is a passable vals tanda, good for a charged crowd later at night. But only Angelica really stands out...
Francini-Pontier - Alberto Podestá y Julio Sosa "El Hijo Triste" 1949 3:49
Alfredo de Angelis - Juan Carlos Godoy "Angélica" 1961 2:41
Héctor Varela - Argentino Ledesma y Rodolfo Lesica "Igual Que Dos Palomas" 1953 2:36
The most legendary tango dancer of the pre-Golden Age fame, Ovidio José "Benito" Bianquet, better known as El Cachafaz ("The Troublesome" / "The Outrageous" as the lunfardo word may be translated) was born Feb 14, 1885). El Cachafaz is celebrated in the lyrics of "Adiós, Arrabal", and that's why I decided to play the following relatively standard D'Agostino tanda during the same practica. Follow El Cachafaz label to read more about this awesome dancer who conquered the affections of the Parisians and triumphantly returned hone, only to lose it all in the post-Great Depression chaos. Who then rebuilt a show dancer's career from scratch when tango started to return to life, but died at 56 without witnessing the full bloom of tango's Golden Age.
In March, I tried a really experimental - and not really recommended - tanda of super-late Calo instrumentals which are all the rage in Europe (it went OK really late at night though):
Miguel Caló - Instrumental "Luna del viejo castillo" 1964 2:37
Miguel Caló - Instrumental "Elegante papirusa" 1966
Miguel Caló - Instrumental "Para Osmar Maderna" 1963
You may know that I am not a big Troilo fan, and I usually stick to the few most reliable tracks of his, but in April I wasin the mood to experiment:
Anibal Troilo - Francisco Fiorentino "Pa Que Bailen Los Muchachos" 1942 2:49
Anibal Troilo - Francisco Fiorentino "No Le Digas Que La Quiero" 1941 2:51
Anibal Troilo - Francisco Fiorentino "Una Carta" 1941 2:48
The month of May is always a good reason to play more, and more varied, Fresedo than usual, since Osvaldo Fresedo was born on May 5, 1887. A son of a wealthy family, Fresedo created elegant music for the upper crust throughout his 60+ years-long tango career. In 1920, Fresedo has become the first tango bandoneonist ever to record in the United States when RCA Victor sent him to New York (they didn't yet have an up-to-date recording studio in South America then; the US-made record's, in Victor's typical anonymous house band fashion, went for sale in Latin America as "Orquesta Tipica Select"). Before the Great Depression, Fresedo's success was so great that he simultaneously maintained 5 "Fresedo orchestras" in Buenos Aires! One of these bands was directed by 24 years old Carlos Di Sarli, an admitted disciple of Osvaldo Fresedo who, in time, far surpassed his teacher. The economic collapse in Argentina put a stop to this exuberance, but Fresedo kept on playing, largely for the upper-class functions. He wouldn't play live for the dancers again, missing the tango dancing boom of the Golden Era, and he remains kind of shunned by the BsAs tangueros for this reason, although he recorded tangos through the 1980s. But nothing could be more mellifluous than Fresedo's 1930s and the early 1940s! This May, one of my Fresedo tandas was with the voice of Ruiz rather than with the "usual" Roberto Ray
Osvaldo Fresedo - Ricardo Ruiz "Y no puede ser" 1939 2:26
Osvaldo Fresedo - Ricardo Ruiz "Plegaria" 1940 2:24
Osvaldo Fresedo - Ricardo Ruiz "Buscándote" 1941 2:49
In June at Junando practica, it was time to return to De Angelis's Angelica which I already mentioned on this page:
Rodolfo Biagi - Hugo Duval y Carlos Heredia "Adoracion" 1951 2:52
Francisco Rotundo - Enrique Campos y Floreal Ruiz "El viejo vals" 1951 2:56
Alfredo De Angelis - Juan Carlos Godoy "Angélica (Vals)" 1961 2:43
There, I also put to test a fiery vals tanda with the voice of Alberto Castillo:
1. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "La Serenata (Mi Amor)" 1941 2:29
2. Alberto Castillo "Idilio Trunco" 1946 2:08
3. Alberto Castillo "Violetas" 1948 2:38
(3 total)
To start the playlists of September, I tried a more or less regular tanda but in an unusual place - as an opening tanda of Milonga sin nombre:
1. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli) - Alberto Gomez "Ventarron" 1933 3:03
2. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli) - Instrumental "Nino bien" 1928 2:43
3. Orquesta Tipica Victor (dir. A. Carabelli) - Instrumental "El chamuyo" 1930 2:46
September is a good time to remember the great singer Alberto Podesta (b. Sep. 22, 1924), who contributed so much to the success of the orchestras of Di Sarli, Calo, and Laurenz. And what would be a better fit to the themes of Podesta and September than his "Roses of Autumn"? Alas, I always had a hard time building a good tanda of Di Sarli's valses with this great hit. Trying to fix it now with a mixed-ochestra set:
1. Angel D'Agostino - Angel Vargas "Que Me Pasara" 1941 2:30
2. Manuel Buzon - Osvaldo Moreno "Pichon enamorado" 1942 2:18
3. Carlos Di Sarli - Alberto Podesta "Rosas De Otono" 1942 2:17
I also returned to the valses with the vocals of Castillo, then an ObGyn by day but a veritable mob lord voice by night.
1. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "Marisabel" 1942 2:23
2. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "Recuerdo" 1942 2:22
3. Ricardo Tanturi - Alberto Castillo "Mi Romance" 1941 2:16
Racciatti's tracks with the voice of Nina Miranda are a kind of a flashback to me. I first danced to Racciatti's when a Japanese DJ played a tanda with Nina Miranda's vocals, fell in love with her "Gloria" and "Tu corazon", and played them myself - good 5 years ago. But the quality of these 1952-1953 records in my hands then was substandard, and I started playing later-years Racciatti's tango with the voice of Olga Delgrossi instead. With a better recordings now, I return to Nina Miranda's hits. And what a pianist they had, by the way!
1. Donato Racciatti - Nina Miranda "Tu corazón" 1953 2:32
2. Donato Racciatti - Nina Miranda "Vencida" 1953 2:47
3. Donato Racciatti - Nina Miranda "No quiero ni acordarme" 1953 2:25
Then at Mestizos I returned to the valses of D'Agostino - one of which I tried a few days earlier in a mixed tanda above - and also to mid-paced Canaro's.
1. Francisco Canaro - Ernesto Fama "El Vals Del Estudiante"1939 3:01
2. Francisco Canaro - Ernesto Fama y Mirna Mores "Tormenta En El Alma" 1940 2:33
3. Francisco Canaro - Ernesto Fama "Noche De Estrellas" 1939 2:29
1. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Que Me Pasara" 1941 2:30
2. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "Tristeza criolla" 1945 2:27
3. Ángel D'Agostino - Ángel Vargas "El Espejo De Tus Ojos" 1944 2:49
And lastly, at Two Flames practica, I asked tangueros for suggestions, and one of them was for the OTV valses. The challenge is that only want to play the same three beloved valses of Victor (Noches de invierno, Sin rumbo fijo, and Temo) and I already played it a bit too often :) So I set out to build mixed-orchestra tandas with OTV - and ended up playing not just one tanda but two:
1. Francisco Lomuto - Fernando Diaz "Cuando estaba enamorado" 1940 2:19
2. Enrique Rodriguez - Roberto Flores "Salud, Dinero Y Amor" 1939 2:39
3. Orquesta Típica Víctor - Ángel Vargas "Sin Rumbo Fijo" 1938 2:18
1. Cuarteto Roberto Firpo - Instrumental "El Aeroplano" 1936 2:14
2. Enrique Rodriguez - Armando Moreno "En el Volga yo te espero" 1943 2:40
3. Orquesta Tipica Victor - Mario Pomar "Temo" 1940 2:55
We the tango DJs don't have any doubts about beginning a milonga with back-to-back tango tandas, the initial two T's of the obligatory TTVTTM tanda sequence of the genres. And why doubt, why overthink the thing, if there are usually too few dancers on the floor at the beginning of a night anyway. The early birds of tango are a special minority in any case, and a DJ is supposed to build the energy flow which works for the majority.
But what about the ending of a milonga, the crescendo of the Cumparsita, the dimmed lights and the overpowering emotions of love and sadness? If you keep repeating TTVTTMs, wouldn't the randomness of added track times mean that sometimes, the scheduled end-time comes with a boisterous laughter of a milonga instead of some poignant tango? Nah, of course we wouldn't do THAT to our beloved dancers :) A DJ may do something, perhaps scrapping the out-of-place milonga tanda, or adding more tangos after it, that's more or less clear. The question is, what is it exactly that you do?
The reason why I started musing about it was very mathematical. I spotted an arithmetic error of sorts in my statistical/fun analysis of the BsAs set-lists. Back then, I calculated that an average milonga had 13 tango tandas and 2.6 milonga tandas, and I was like, hmm, the number of the milonga tandas is less that 13/4, so their flow is probably not a perfect TTVTTM ... they must be skipping or replacing a milonga tanda here and there.
Sheesh. Now I saw the numbers in a different light. 2.6 milonga tandas (or 2.7 vals tandas), on average, would mean that approximately 10.5 tango tandas took place in the regular TTVTTM groupings. To add up to 13 average tango tandas, one would need to add, on average, 2.5 more tandas of tango. And it occurred to me that it's exactly what's happening ... at the end of a night!
Melina Sedo, the Encuentro warrior and DJ
Is it "in the books" or just a commonsense thing? My first thought was, I couldn't have invented it, I must have read about the "best ways to end a tango night" somewhere. But the only "DJing manual" detailing proper selection of the last tandas I found was a super-micromanaging article by Melina Sedo (and I definitely haven't read it before!)
Melina writes: "The 2 or 3 last tandas are those especially determining the emotional state people leave the milonga in. The final tanda should be tango, not vals and never milonga." (Big-name DJs occasionally - rarely - do play valses at the end, and perhaps a slow and dreamy milonga campera may fit occasionally, when the mood is right).
Since I have a good collection of published playlists, I couldn't resist quantifying what *I* do.
It turned that my pre-Cumparsita tanda is always a tango. And in the majority of my playlists, at least 3 final tandas are tango (but I often play danceable music after the Cumparsita ... often energetic and upbeat music, since I picked the habit from Momo Smitt who explained that it was the "furniture-moving music"). The numbers average at 2.5 final tango sets, perfectly paralleling the prediction from the BsAs statistics.
How many tango tandas before the Cumparsita?
I also tallied the orchestras I select for the final two tandas. I knew that Pugliese would be a winner, since his orchestra is so perfect for the crescendo build-up. And surely it was:
Pugliese 64 tandas (!) (and most of the lists without Pugliese in the final tandas had a Pugliese tanda right before them)
Mixed ultimate and penultimate tandas - 11 incl Sassone, Firpo, late-era bands including Color Tango, Ojos de Tango, Fervor de BsAs, Krebsian Orchestra, Nuevo Quinteto Real, as well as some of the above orchestras (this clearly defies Melina's advice to play only true-and-tried classic sets in the end...)
I can clearly see that I am biased against Di Sarli for the crescendo-building sets, and it's probably explained by my overexposure to late, dramatic Di Sarli's in my beginner classes. It's just hard to overcome the kryptonite "I'm a beginner all over again" vibe of this uncommonly elegant music. But as a cancer professional, I also find it hard not to see the specter of cancer in Di Sarli's perfect, late-period pieces. The Senior of Tango must have known that his pancreatic tumor doesn't leave him much time, and he was in a race against time to bring the rough, crude hits of his youth to an elegant perfection - an almost morbid perfection. Have you read Pushkin's "Exegi Monumentum"? "The monument I’ve built is not in chiseled stone"? For someone on the oncology field, it may be painful to sense. Forgive me.
I've just discovered the new star of the tango blogosphere, a super sharp and eloquent Igor Zabuta of Ukraine. And couldn't help remembering one obsessively and mutually musical tanda at last years Connect, and translating a passage from one of Igor's beautiful posts. Photo credits to Kyle Asher
There are pairs who feel a kind of a split challenge to dance musically, come what may. They step onto the dance floor with a mission to express the music together. It takes a special respect to the music and a peculiar courage. It is so understandable ... indeed, what could be more helpful for a great connection between people than a lucky overlap of their obsessions :)
